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NC Amendment One - Shades of Gray

10 May 2012

Following the primary election and vote on amendment one in North Carolina, I saw a huge number of hastily created maps passed around online depicting the counties for or against amendment one. These maps however, failed to tell a very complete story. The picture was painted very black and white. Either a county was for or against.

Yes, this was the way the votes were tallied. True, it very much was a pass or fail issue. Still, I wanted to understand the distribution better. News outlets discussed age and party affiliation being factors, so I found the data pertaining to this as well.

With all this compiled I created a map depicting the shades of gray existing between what had been presented as a completely black and white issue. This map is shown below. Further, if you click on any of the counties, a popup displays metrics including median age and voter turnout. Two pie graphs are also included in the popup, one depicting the ratio between those for and against the amendment and another depicting the party affiliation in the county.

This map was created by simply putting together data from the NC State Board of Elections in ArcMap 10.1. Yes, working for Esri I have access to the pre-release software. The data was then symbolized by showing a ratio between those for and those against the amendment. This map was then published to ArcGIS.com where the map was created and the popups configured. From there, I just copied the embed code into this blog post as an iframe. The whole process took less than an hour.